Corona current
"This is not about me, this is about us all"
Juliane is closer to the corona virus than almost anyone. As an intensive care nurse, she fights for the lives of her patients every day. And she has something to say to us.
My colleague says: "You scared me so, where did you get this terrible picture of yourself from?"
Juliane shows this "terrible picture" that said colleague speaks of. Juliane is 23 years old and has been working as an intensive care nurse since 2019. While other people their age were still studying, traveling and doing what young millennials do, the nurse devoted herself to the life-support measures of people in intensive care units. At the beginning of her career, she could not have foreseen that ventilators would soon dominate her everyday life.
"Two months after my exams we all heard the word" COVID-19 "for the first time, Juliane recalls in an interview with Brigitte.de, "and in March of this year the first patients arrived, many of them with a difficult course".
The invisible stories of the corona pandemic
From her first year of employment, the first year with Corona, she bears traces of it. They can be seen in photos like the one Juliane recently shared on Instagram. It shows her face in close-up, marked with welts and mask marks from a long day. The young woman looks exhausted. But much more important to her are the invisible stories that her face tells after a shift: "I was in my room with my patient with COVID for over an hour to help her with care, food and ventilation," she writes about the Photo. There she took care not only of her health, but above all of their feelings: "She cried, she became a great-grandmother during the hospital stay and wants nothing more than to get to know the great-grandchildren. (…) She is afraid of not making it anymore. "
Nursing staff between staff shortages, patient care, empathy – and playing with their own health
It is an individual fate, but it stands for one of the thousands of numbers that we receive daily from Corona cases in the news. Why is Juliane telling us this story? Because she considers it necessary "if there are almost 1000 deaths from COVID within 24 hours, lateral thinkers and Nazis demonstrate side by side against vaccines and 'oppression'".
The intensive care nurse does not want to feel sorry for her contribution, she wants to wake up. And not just the people who are still not staying at home. But also politics: "In nursing you always work with full concentration and attention, since Corona it has only become more difficult to meet the various demands. The dichotomy between lack of time, adequate patient care, empathy and recognition has widened even more." , Juliane explains to us on request.
Those who still do not adhere to the measures to contain the corona pandemic should remember that they are not primarily harming themselves – but rather vulnerable groups and the people who take care of them. "The entire hospital staff, workers from retail and logistics and many others are currently trying to maintain a country in a crisis, which has not believed in them for a long time ", writes Juliane honestly.
It took a long time for the intensive care nurse to decide to go public. Months she devoted to other people's lives. And now she wants to turn her attention away from herself again. Rather, Juliane ends her Instagram post with an appeal:
This is not about me, this is about us all. We have to somehow get this thing to the safe haven together, whether we like it or not. Everyone plays an equally important role.